How to prepare your content for your poster presentation

The first thing to do before you start working of your research poster is to organize your text, images, graphs, charts, logos, etc.  This is the most important and often the most overlooked time saving-part of the process.

Many research poster presentations are conversions of  pre-existing documents such as multi-slide PowerPoint presentations or multi-page MS Word documents. Because these documents were initially created for other purposes, I recommend that you create a temporary rough draft document in Microsoft Word, and use it to paste all the text you are going to eventually include on your poster presentation. But don’t spend any time formatting the text. It’s only purpose is to help you organize and edit your poster content. Later on, you are going to use this document as the source from which you’ll be copying and pasting onto your poster.

Before copying any information on your draft document, create the following sections. These are standard sections for poster presentations and will help present your research clearly and professionally.

Standard scientific poster sections:

• The poster title (with author names directly underneath followed by the names of associated institutions)
• Introduction, Background, or Abstract
• (a place to quickly summarize your topic and trigger your audience’s interest)
• Materials and Methods or Process (a place to describe your process and what led to your results)
• Results (the place where the results of your experiment are explained)
• Conclusions or Discussion (the place where you explain why your results are conclusive and provide the reader with a short but solid justification of your hypothesis)
• References or Literature Cited (This is where you make a list of the literature you have cited regarding this project. List the names of authors, publications and publishing dates)
• Acknowledgments sometimes replaced by Contact Information (This section is optional but if you have the room you can use it to thank the people who helped with your project of provide your contact information)

See the video tutorial on how to copy your text from your existing to document to your new draft document. Pay particular attention to the use of the “paste options” tab. It helps remove the text formatting from the pasted text.